We use cookies in order to improve the quality and usability of the HSE website. More information about the use of cookies is available here, and the regulations on processing personal data can be found here. By continuing to use the site, you hereby confirm that you have been informed of the use of cookies by the HSE website and agree with our rules for processing personal data. You may disable cookies in your browser settings.

Many people are able to recognize the personality traits of the person they are talking to by their facial features. Experts in non-verbal communication can do this even with a photograph. But is it possible to teach artificial intelligence to do the same?

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, people around the world have faced an unprecedented crisis. The cataclysm has impacted Russia as well. Who will better deal the hardships—experienced baby boomers, Gen Xers who survived the 1990s, or Gen Yers who have had an easy life?

In lockdowns, why do some people stay home, while others violate the quarantine rules and go out for picnics in the park? Behavioural economics may provide the answer to this question. Oksana Zinchenko, a Research Fellow of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, explains how we can predict people’s behaviour with game theory.

‘And Quiet Flows the Don’ is an epic novel, considered one of the most significant works of Russian and world literature. The debate on the authorship of ‘And Quiet Flows the Don’ had been surrounding the novel since its first release in 1928 by Mikhail Sholokhov, who was repeatedly accused of plagiarism. The supporters of the plagiarism theory often indicate that the real author of the novel is the Cossack writer, Fyodor Kryukov, who died before ‘And Quiet Flows the Don’ was published. In the present study we applied the information-based similarity analysis (Yang et al., 2003a, Linguistic analysis of human heartbeats using frequency and rank order statistics. Physical Review Letters, 90: 108103; Yang et al., 2003b, Information categorization approach to literary authorship disputes. Physica A, 329, 473) and Burrows's Delta (Burrows, 2002, ‘Delta’: a measure of stylistic difference and a guide to likely authorship. Literary and Linguistic Computing, 17(3):267–87) to a corpus of Russian literature of XIX and XX centuries. We next used these two methods to compare ‘And Quiet Flows the Don’ to Sholokhov’s and Kryukov’s writings. It was found that Fyodor Kryukov writings are distinct from ‘And Quiet Flows the Don’, whilst Sholokhov’s writings being close to the Don novel. The results also highlight how both information similarity analysis and Delta analysis can be used Russian language.

The article proposes, justifies, and tests a new methodological framework to
measure museum ‘soft power’ by employing geo-visualization as a new
method empowered by the rapid development of digital humanities. This research
not only demystifies the buzz term of ‘soft power’ that is frequently
applied in relation to contemporary museums and their international cultural
engagements but also develops an evaluation framework to assess museum capacities
to exert global impacts. Specifically, the article draws on the academic
scholarship outlining a plethora of approaches for ‘soft power’ evaluation,
including Resources, Outputs, Perceptions, and Networks evaluation models. It
argues for a new integrative approach that can comprehensively combine different
methods to construct a more advanced tool to measure museum ‘soft power’.
The article draws on preliminary results of developing a digital mapping system
to assess museum soft power. It shares findings from the pilot project, Australian
Center of the Moving Image (ACMI) on the Global Map, designed in collaboration
with the ACMI in Melbourne.

This paper presents a study of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace by means of automatic syntactic and semantic analysis. Using a parser that extracts syntactic dependencies and semantic roles, we were able to compare different characters of the novel in terms of the semantic roles they tend to occupy. Our data shows that there are certain dependencies between the apparent personal traits of a character and his or her positions within the predicate structures. We hope that further research will help us gain more insights into the ‘literary technique’ of Tolstoy and enable us to create a semantic markup of his works.

Vossian Antonomasia is a prolific stylistic device, in use since antiquity. It can compress the introduction or description of a person or another named entity into a terse, poignant formulation and can best be explained by an example: When Norwegian world champion Magnus Carlsen is described as "the Mozart of chess", it is Vossian Antonomasia we are dealing with. The pattern is simple: A source (Mozart) is used to describe a target (Magnus Carlsen), the transfer of meaning is reached via a modifier ("of chess"). This phenomenon has been discussed before (as 'metaphorical antonomasia' or, with special focus on the source object, as 'paragons'), but no corpus-based approach has been undertaken as yet to explore its breadth and variety. We are looking into a full-text newspaper corpus (The New York Times, 1987–2007) and describe a new method for the automatic extraction of Vossian Antonomasia based on Wikidata entities. Our analysis offers new insights into the occurrence of popular paragons and their distribution.